The
writing on the wall outside asks that visitors be quiet and respectful.
The words are a gentle reminder that this is no benign exhibition of pretty
nature photographs, although there are many trees in these pictures. Inside
the small gallery, the only ones ignoring the request are two restless,
talkative toddlers in strollers, gliding along well below the rows of
framed photos. At lunchtime on a sunny Wednesday in May, more than twenty
people have made their way into the close, black-walled room, blinking
as their eyes adjust to the dimness. Abruptly, the somber mood
is jarred by an African-American man who suddenly strides for the exit.
Ill be outside, he says loudly to a companion over his
shoulder. Ive had enough!

Many
visitors quickly come to feel they have had enough of Without Sanctuary:
Lynching Photography in America, an exhibition co-presented by Emory
and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. Some viewers have
admitted it took weeks to steel themselves to come and see it. To stumble
into the show unknowingly would be like tripping over a dead body in a
public park. The graphic images of hanged, burned, and mutilated corpses
are profoundly terrible to look at; worse, they are almost impossible
to forget.

Yet
more than twelve thousand people did come to see them during the first
three weeks of the exhibition alone. It is precisely because of their
deeply disturbing nature that Emory leaders, after some two years of careful
consideration, decided to help mount these thirty-six photographs in Atlanta
for public view.

Emorys
role in sponsoring the lynching exhibition is, in part, an outgrowth
of the Universitys Year of Reconciliation, and the efforts made
here to come to terms with what we once were, what we ought to be, and
how we reconcile the decent within all of us with the hateful, says
President William M. Chace.

The
collection of lynching photography belongs to Atlantans James Allen and
John Littlefield, who have permanently loaned the pictures to the Emory
libraries Special Collections. In Without Sanctuary,
which first opened in New York, they are mounted simply, displayed alongside
textual descriptions and a wealth of supporting materials. Over the last
decade, Allen and Littlefield have amassed some 150 photographs, most
of which were snapped at lynching eventswhere crowds of hundreds,
even thousands, of onlookers might gather to enjoy the spectacleand
then sold as souvenirs or sent to relatives.

Now
these cast-aside keepsakes, once treated as carelessly as Southern black
life itself, are being viewed with a different purpose: to promote knowledge
and healing among the bearers of this dark legacy.

Such
regeneration does not come without pain. In the months leading up to the
exhibition, a committee led by Thee Smith, associate professor of religion
and deacon of St. Phillips Cathedral, held a series of forums to gather
reaction to the prospect. Some in the University argued that to dig up
and display such unspeakable horrors could only cause more harm; others
worried that the exhibition would create a sense of atonement too cheaply
won.

But
leaders both within Emory and from the outside community have implored
Southerners to look upon this brutal chapter of their past with open eyes
and honest hearts.

As
we learn and as we teach our learning, said President Chace at the
opening ceremony May 1, we at times mustif we are honestconfront
the terrifying. We must learn how at times people have behaved, very badly
behaved. Our only comfort comes from our knowledge that people have not
always behaved badly. That comfort can come from, among other places,
the vision of the man [King] whose body lies interred across the street.

One
oft-cited reason for mounting the Without Sanctuary exhibition
is that much like Nazi Holocaust documentation, the lynching photographs
provide a visual record of wrongs that cannot be denied. Although such
extralegal mob justice killings were not confined to a period,
place, or race, an estimated five thousand blacks died at the hands of
whites in the South between 1882 and 1968.

Cynthia
Tucker, editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote,
There are those Americans who still wish to deny, to equivocate,
to dispute the savage history of American racism. They will not want to
see Without Sanctuary. . . . It would rob them of their defenses.

Perhaps
even more chilling than the images of dangling bodies are the hundreds
of white faces gathered to watch the ritual killings, their rapt, expectant
faces frozen forever on film. Men, women, even children of barely two
generations ago point and smile as if theyre watching a hog tie
at the county fair, not a human life ending in degradation and agony.
Their beaming faces, wrote Tucker, bear witness to their
depraved souls.

Just
as African Americans now must experience the pain that comes of identifying
with the victims, so must whites endure the sting of recognition, says
Smith. But the potential for progress is great.

This
exhibition could provide the catalyst for a kind of breakthrough on race
awareness in the U.S. like nothing else has been able to do, Smith
says. As white Americans have reported to me, they see themselves
in those photographs in a way they never have before. They look at those
bystanders and see their aunts, uncles, people who could have been their
own family members, and say, how could we have been party to this kind
of violence?

When
visitors leave Without Sanctuary, they find themselves facing
a wall bearing the first verse of the poem Strange Fruit,
written in 1937 by a Jewish schoolteacher from New York and put to music
two years later by blues legend Billie Holiday. The words are brought
to lurid life by the images inside the gallery: Southern trees bear
strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swinging
in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

The
song and the pictures seem to drive irrevocably home the stark, shocking
truth of lynching in the South: No matter how much talking, weeping, and
memorializing we do, those faces and the shameful scars they passed on
cannot be erased from our history. At the opening ceremony of Without
Sanctuary, where a crowd of several hundred, including Martin Luther
King Jr.s widow, Coretta Scott King, were gathered, Smith offered
a benediction that expressed what can be hoped for instead.

In
search of sanctuary, he said, if you are a praying person,
pray on behalf of the victims, that there may be justice on the earth.
If you are a forgiving person, forgive the perpetrators for the sake of
the possibility of rehabilitation. If you are a generous person, grant
to the photographers the possibility of undeserved grace: that their images
and craft may be used for nobler causes today.

And
if you are a self-loving person, lets work together to rescue ourselves
and our children from the fate of becoming bystanders in a world without
sanctuary.P.P.P.

Without
Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America will be on display in
the Visitor Center at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site,
450 Auburn Avenue Northeast, Atlanta, May 1 to December 31. Volunteers
are needed through the run of the exhibition to serve as docents, lead
dialogue groups, provide listener support, and staff events such as the
film series and conference. Professional training will be provided, focusing
on historical facts behind the materials as well as skills for effectively
dealing with the emotions raised in viewers. Volunteers may continue to
attend monthly training sessions as needed. Inquiries about volunteering
should be directed to the Volunteer Coordinator, special_projects@emory.edu
or 404.727.0991. For more about the MLK Jr. historic site, go to www.nps.gov/malu.
For more about the exhibition, go to